TQ35 Guest Poet: Traci Brimhall
Poetry writing is a holistic proposition, and I believe we ought to talk about craft granularly while we discuss the psychological growth and wellbeing (or lack thereof) that drove it. Since high school, we’ve rightly been New Critically conditioned to separate the speaker from the poet, but I want to restore unity for the sake of this discussion about art making. While we’re feeling retrospective, let’s admit old-school pop cultural influences, personal milestones, relational drama, and makeover montages into the record.
L.J.’s rules of the game:
“The Proustian Questionnaire” is a parlor game lauded by Marcel Proust, the French writer, for its revealing power. To poet-guests, I present all 35 original quiz questions with the Be Kind Rewind version riding parenthetical sidecar—like a madeleine beside the tea. My poet-guests select six from the list to answer: two from The Now, two from The Then, and two from The Way Back When.
Let’s get started:
Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, November 2024), the poet’s fourth collection, is a “museum of fire” full of associative play, effervescent music, the blithe yet confident mentorship of narrative, and oracular zingers that feel less like truth statements than the speaker’s motley slipping to reveal the warrior beneath. Brimhall herself will tell you she’s “chaotic neutral” as a person, but this collection is built on a solid and seriously emotional foundation of humanistic recovery after an existentialist (even nihilistic) fall. Love returns because the poet wills it home. Because she knows “hope is a discipline.” Dawn keeps dawning in the book’s frequent aubades, phoenixes rise, and with titles like “Someday I’ll love Traci Brimhall,” the poet’s winking humor and artful compositions entreat us to welcome love fantastical into the everyday with Brimhall as our powerful mentor through the Magical Quotidian.
I interviewed Traci about her book, her writing life, and the truth of how she got Here.
LJS: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? (The BKR version: People love to ask one another about Zodiac signs, enneagram numbers, or Myers-Briggs type. Let’s spin the wheel and land where you like. How has a weakness, according to your self-assessment (based on one of those rubrics or one of your own devising), contributed to or challenged your work as a writer? If you could proffer to your younger poet-self one sugar cube of advice to get them to progress faster, what would it be?)
TB: I think most of my writing style is a weakness, honestly. Because many of the tricks up my sleeve come naturally to me, I tend to devalue them. Primarily my too-much-ness, though. I even had a reviewer make fun of my lines in a review by making up their own extravagant lush imagery that bent far into the strange and surreal, and I was like...I see that you’re trying to mock me, but that’s such a banger line, bro. And then I quoted his review in a poem because that line shouldn’t go to waste. I wanted to reclaim something that somebody was trying to use to shame me.
LJS: [Laughs.] You saying, “I think most of my writing style is a weakness, honestly,” is making me snort...to what degree do you actually mean this answer? Please, say more.
TB: I so wish I had different strengths about almost everything in life. Poetry is sort of a last resort. I wish I was a singer. I wish I was a dancer. I wish I was a visual artist. I just don’t have those gifts. And so poetry was something I felt moderately okay-ish at, but I was telling my students Friday, “Oh yeah, don’t be fooled. My letter of recommendation for grad school did not say the word ‘talent.’” It said, “Traci works so hard; she’s just the hardest worker. Everyone around her will want to work harder when they see how hard she’s working.” But there was nothing about how good of a writer I was. I was not. I was absolutely the worst person in my advanced poetry workshop. But I do work hard, and I think actually sucking at poetry made me a better teacher because I can see what makes language shimmer better because I worked hard to learn every lesson. I wasn’t a natural. And I think the fact that I figured out bits and pieces along the way makes me good at communicating how to do it better. There are some things that I don’t think are teachable in a classroom. Like, I don’t think you can give somebody a vision. We do work on finding inspiration from different places, but somebody’s unique vision is totally unique to them.
I identify as chaotic good (or at least a chaotic neutral), but I can’t seem to be less on the page or in life. And while it’s a smidge embarrassing to be a bit messy, I also stand by my strange. It’s great to have so many voices in PoetryLand, and it’s totally fine if a voice isn’t for everyone. Better to find those who get you and whom you get in return.
As far as how that might lead to advice...celebrate your natural strengths and figure out what craft elements also help you balance it. All of our agonist muscles have an antagonistic pair to balance them, and identifying how to bulk up the weaker half of your natural gifts is better than being less of the strengths you naturally have.
LJS: Returning to those things that make poetry ‘shimmer better’: if you can pull from the advice you offer to your students, are there definite “Do’s” and “Dont’s?” As in, “Hey, never do THAT!”
TB: I try not to ‘never’ anybody. ‘Never’ should just be forbidden in almost all conversations. Except we do have things like, I will say, “Pick three adjectives that are common for a noun. And now what’s the opposite?” Right? So, just down to picking a totally different word, or, if you put them on a carousel and rotate those three adjectives to three new places, what happens?
I also feel like one of the strategies is, “What isn’t there yet?” If it’s all so real, what’s the line of reality that highlights the surreality? And if it’s all concrete, what’s the line that changes the dimension? Once you have a single line of something that isn’t there yet, it highlights everything else. So, if it’s a deeply musical poem, if you do something with lower diction, more plainspoken, it just pulls the two dimensions into three.
I have all sorts of “Tricky Do’s” like that.
We talk about ‘chording’–how to make a moment of title, beginning, and ending work together like a chord. Or an ‘image chord’ through the poem where you don’t say the same thing each time, but it’s part of the same image world. And so then, even if your poem leaps a lot, there’s a way to anchor a wildly imaginative or listy, leapy poem. To ‘chord’ it: to have three notes that by the time you get to the end, you’re like, “Whoa. It radiates better!” Because of the notes that came before it, because you’re hitting those.
I have little micro lectures on endings, micro lectures on lists, how to make a list work, micro lectures on all of it. Because I never feel like I’m the smartest person in the room, but I do try and pay attention.
LJS: What is your idea of a perfect happiness? (BKR version: We’re all chasing THE BIG POEM. Tell us your dream of writing a viral poem. Or, if you’ve already written a poem you think deserves to contend for icon status, which one is it and why?)
TB: I think I’m currently in one of my big happinesses. I have found that slippery feeling, that maker’s well, really easy to slip into and draw from. The happiness is usually about how it feels ‘to make’ for me. The poems can even resist me or take a long time, but if I feel close to my own creative energy, I’m in one of my perfect happinesses–not perfect because the poems are, but because I understand I am inside the mystery and we are working something out with each other. The ideas come. The words. Not always in a way I’m working with well at first, but the gentle struggle of it all is part of the happiness.
Someone reading the poem or seeing me read are wonderful feelings, but–for me–not quite the same as the private joy that writing often offers me. In the age when algorithms tell me what I likely want and the AI in my phone helps answer my questions and give me directions, the privacy of my own mind feels even more important to me.
LJS: Which talent would you most like to have? (BKR version: If we look at Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments—the Myers-Briggs of poetry personality—, order is key. I’m an I-S-M-S (Imagination-Story-Music-Structure though the double ‘s’ of Story and Structure throws an alphabetical wrench into this conceit, so let’s change Story to Narrative; now, that’s better: INMS). What’s your order? And explain how you’ve seen this pattern enacted in your work over time.)
TB: I’m OBSESSED with this question! I teach Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments all the time, and I love calling it the Myers-Briggs of poetry personality! I think we might be twinsies, as I think I am also I-N-M-S. I was much stronger in narrative when I began because I came to poetry through required college classes and thought I was a fiction writer. And my poetry stories were life stories. And they were sad.
But I caught myself looking through a photo album for another tragic memory and was like...yikes on bikes. I do not want to have to suffer to make art. I think myself and my thoughts and feelings and stories still definitely show up, but between books 1 and 2 (and even still in 3), I let my imagination lead. I think it’s truly a superpower.
I like my imagination. I like my wildness, but I also look for ways to structure and contain it, because I do feel like one of the superpowers of imagination is that it can go on forever. While structure/form brings up the rear, I’d say the reason my stanzas are SO EQUAL so much of the time is that I’m trying to keep the guardrails up. I also feel like I’m trying to create the sense that I know you’re bouncing around on this trip a little bit, but I’ve put your safety harness on, and we’re on the rails, right? Even if my poems seem utterly bananas, I’m hoping that my care with line and stanza lets people know that someone is still at the wheel. With hands at 10 and 2 no less. So even if the poem is too much, I still tried to contain it and shape it.
LJS: What is it that you most dislike? (BKR version: Discuss a vexing draft—one that’s either resolved well or... not.)
TB: I’m absolute poo at received forms. I understand the rules, and as long as I only need to terribly fit those rules, then maybe some of my poems qualify if you squint really hard. I can get friendly with a ghazal and produce some very off the wall sonnets, but mostly I’m terrible at following rules.
I used to make it an annual tradition to try a set of 6 received forms (sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and abecedarian). Even if I don’t feel good at them, doing a set of circuit training exercises is helpful. Because even if my own efforts don’t make very good poems, it still helps make me a better teacher and reader if I practice writing and revising my failures.
LJS: To belie your claim about being ‘absolute poo’ at received forms, I submit (actually... YOU submitted!) Exhibit A: the crown of sonnets titled “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets,” which is featured snugly within the pages of Love Prodigal. What are the rules of this sonnet crown? Because you violate the standard rules, right?
TB: I’ve written quite a few essays that use poetic forms as structures. I knew I wanted to do a prose sonnet crown for a while, and I knew I wanted to braid all of my obsessions together in one central piece in the book.
But of course, I am bad at following form rules. So, while the first line of the next prose sonnet DOES echo the last one, I take a lot of liberties with it, too. The couplet titles also make a sonnet if read across the section. And I also tried to include some subtle couplet rhymes in the end of each prose sonnet.
It lived on closet doors when I was at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. It’s the type of longer project I need more mental space to move around, so having the protected time of a writing residency really helped me keep track of everything I was trying to create/include there. I also had the help of my incredible editor at Copper Canyon, Ash Wynter. She really helped me clean up and restructure everything because my syntax got a bit unwieldy at points.
LJS: Apart from the sonnets, I have so many favorite poems from Love Prodigal with memorable images, juxtapositions, and lines. Here’s some from “Cold, Crazy, Broken”: “Before the end, it was like the story / of a woman who woke to her pet constrictor stretched / out against her in bed, tail hooked to toe, split tongue / tasting the salt of her dream, each vein hot with her sleep, / and her veterinarian warned the beloved serpent was / measuring to see if she’d fit.” I’m never going to forget that image.
TB: I know. Someone told me that story, and I’ve never forgotten.
LJS: No, it’s insane. As is this anecdote about W.H. Auden in the poem “The Book of the Dead”: “You know I swore this year I would rescue nothing. / When dictionary editors tried to banish words, / W.H. Auden put them in poems, evidence they // remained ripe for revival. Unpopular, but useful. / Still wanted. His whole body of work a love story / with shifting plotlines and nearly dead language // as the ingenue. Come back to bed, the worst is over.” The subtle control of layering seemingly plain language with the deft wryness of your voice makes for a familiar-strange trip. I’ve starred so many pages, including “Museum of Fire” because it’s..., well, here’s the beginning: “The yard is spangled with a benign pandemic of dandelions, / soft gold waiting to mature into wishes, and we are waiting // for the fevers to pass. We stay indoors, build robots out / of recycling and domino labyrinths, snap plastic Lego bricks, // into towers and cars. My son wants to make a skyscraper / that is also a Museum of Fire,” and the speaker and the boy proceed through–toy floor by toy floor- “the history of fire” replete with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the library of Alexandria and this is the exact kind of poem I adore: one that that casts a pin-spot light on today’s losses (cue a familiar domestic scene) and then opens the aperture ever wider on the broader context of human history. I think this poem is a brilliant allegory.
TB: That one took me so long to find a home for. So thank you for saying that.
LJ: I feel like that’s funny because the poem is the thematic locus of the collection: so rooted to fire, phoenixes red-rising, and the higgity-jiggity propulsion of growth (and its epistemology). You know, these poems feel a bit like long tracking shots with the camera on a dolly, and we’re moving-seeing-thinking through a museum of losses as they convert back into something more hopeful.
TB: Thank you. Oh my gosh. Before the book, one of the things I was figuring out was how to fall back in love with poetry. I reread the books I was reading when I wrote my first book and I also reread my own poems–and just trying to reignite the hot coals down there, but there was not a roaring fire for me and poetry. I had to ask myself, “How do I rebuild that fire?” Now I do try to stay in touch with it because just sort of like a fire, it’s harder to restart if it goes out. But sometimes it’s a lot; it is more grueling, just like my physical fitness.
LJS: Where would you most like to live? (BKR version: In Poetlandia, who would you most want as your next door neighbors? Why?)
TB: My friends! I’d love a “Golden Girls” style poetry retirement commune where we sit in our house dresses and have our dogs and our books and say witty things and make each other laugh. I always say that I’m a poet for the friendships. Of course not all poets have turned out to be great people, but honestly most poets really are the best humans. I want to hang out with our iced teas and straw hats somewhere warm.
LJS: Who is your hero of fiction? (BKR version: Which character(s) in fiction (or nonfiction, film, drama, or any other art form for that matter) rates high with you? Why?)
TB: On my drive home from work today I was thinking about how Uncle Iroh from Avatar: the Last Airbender is my animated crush right now. Which is a weird mental category to have, perhaps, but there it is. I ruminate on his wisdom and kindness and badassery a fair bit. I think he is really good at patience and love and fun and so many of the things I hope to be.